Adam David Morton's avatarurbanculturalstudies

Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s fifth novel to be featured in my personal blog, For the Desk Drawer, is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated in the context of the Great Terror in Soviet Russia orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. In the sequence that constitutes the ‘defeat-in-victory’ trilogy (preceded by Midnight in the Century [1939] and succeeded by The Long Dusk [1943-5]), the novel intersects in several subtle ways with Serge’s other books. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a chronicle of the Moscow arrests and show trials in the 1930s that pulls in a myriad of characters as well as the overbearing appearance of ‘the Chief’, Stalin himself. It does so by offering at least two intersections to aspects present in Serge’s earlier novels. First, it offers a set of intersecting elements linked to…

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China releases geographic coordinates of disputed Diaoyu Island and 70 Islets

 In a move to affirm its sovereignty over the disputed Diaoyu Islands, the State Oceanic Administration (SOA), China, released geographic coordinates of the Island and some of its affiliated islets. The SOA announced details about the exact longitude and latitude of the Diaoyu Island and 70 of its affiliated islets. It published location maps, three-dimension effect graphs and sketch maps for the Diaoyu Islands.

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Temples of Resurgent India: Most Important Dams of India

The Tehri Dam is a multi-purpose rock and earth-fill embankment dam on the Bhagirathi River near Tehri in Uttarakhand, India. It is the primary dam of the Tehri Hydro Development Corporation Ltd. and the Tehri hydroelectric complex. The dam is a 260 metres (850 ft) high rock and earth-fill embankment dam. Its length is 575 metres (1,886 ft), crest width 20 metres (66 ft), and base width 1,128 metres (3,701 ft).

 

Bhakra Dam is a concrete gravity dam across the Sutlej River, and is near the border between Punjab and Himachal Pradesh in northern India. The dam, located at a gorge near the (now submerged) upstream Bhakra village in Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, is Asia’s second highest at 225.55 m (740 ft) high next to the 261m Tehri Dam. The length of the dam (measured from the road above it) is 518.25 m; it is 9.1 m broad. Its reservoir, known as the “Gobind Sagar”, stores up to 9.34 billion cubic meters of water, enough to drain the whole of Chandigarh, parts of Haryana, Punjab and Delhi.The 90 km long reservoir created by the Bhakra Dam is spread over an area of 168.35 km2. In terms of storage of water, it withholds the second largest reservoir in India, the first being Indira Sagar dam in Madhya Pradesh with capacity of 12.22 billion cu m.Nangal dam is another dam downstream of Bhakra dam.

The Sardar Sarovar Dam is a gravity dam on the Narmada River near Navagam, Gujarat, India. It is the largest dam and part of the Narmada Valley Project, a large hydraulic engineering project involving the construction of a series of large irrigation and hydroelectric multi-purpose dams on the Narmada River. The project took form in 1979 as part of a development scheme to increase irrigation and produce hydroelectricity. It is the 30th largest dams planned on river Narmada, Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD) is the largest structure to be built. It has a proposed final height of 163 m (535 ft) from foundation. The dam is one of India’s most controversial dam projects and its environmental impact and net costs and benefits are widely debated. The World Bank was initially a funder of the SSD, but withdrew in 1994. The Narmada Dam has been the centre of controversy and protest since the late 1980s.

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rmpicton's avatarurbangeography

Benjamin’s explorations of the city, in such texts as Berlin Chronicle, One Way Street, and most famously his Arcades Project, used moments, or ‘scraps of urban life’ to unlock the intimate connection between the spiritual and material manifestations of urban life. His fragmented images of childhood in Berlin Chronicle, unpublished in his lifetime, are retelling the story of the city, and recall the fleeting moments of urban life. Benjamin had a topographical imagination and embraced “thingness: seeing, hearing, and feeling only buildings, fences, doorknobs, vistas monuments, signboards, street names.” (Merrifield, 2002: 50). Through sight, smell and reading the city, allow the student of the city to come to decipher the signs of the city. He draws from George Simmel, a thinker of the modern metropolitan experience, which treatise, the Metropolis and Mental Life investigates the psychological basis of money on the metropolis itself and it alters everyday life according to…

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